I thought the same when I read this. I've met the people at NITLE who are developing an implementation of LSI. It is impressive and they have a download of their software available via CVS. For persons interested in this area of research it is worth the while to look at what NITLE is doing.
It all depends on the nature of your research. I work in the field of Humanities Computing. While I represent the CS wing (as opposed to the Humanities), examples abound where the formatting and visual properties of a literary object are essential for research. Separation of content and presentation is a misnomer for the people I work with.
That said, I think any digitization that makes the materials available is a good thing, but it may not serve the research needs for everyone.
Another one that is rampant at my company is top-posting. Everyone insists on quoting a message in a reply and proceeding to post their comments at the top. When I try to lead by example and properly bottom-post, people complain my emails are not clear. Argh.
I used to fight this issue, but I confess that I've joined the dark side. Many email clients discourage it or make it unnecessarily difficult. I'm not 100% certain, but I think the style emerged from Usenet etiquette, where context is important if everyone doesn't have a threaded newsreader. While I'm grounded in this tradition, others don't get it.
I email with my geek and old-timer friends in threaded mode and top-post at my workplace.
I don't think traffic calming and efficiency are at odds. There are scenarios, such as intersections near Universities and public buildings, where it is desirable to discourage fast driving.
I lived in Washington DC for several years. The traffic is notoriously bad. I avoided much of it by commuting on bicycle, however they made every attempt to streamline it. Not for one moment do I believe they were intentionally adding to the gridlock. It is one issue that is guaranteed to mobilize the electorate, so I doubt the conspiracy theory that traffic is intentionally slow to drive commuters onto public transit. If the current delays won't do it, what makes anyone think more delay will work?
I had a friend who worked with the National Weather Service at the Department of Agriculture. You might find his explanation of this service interesting. He was often called upon to verify or negate rumors about blizzards or various weather calamities that may have been perpetuated by rivals. In effect, a banana exporter may find it profitable if people think the supply is in danger from foul weather. His group made sure that US importers didn't pay any fraudulent premiums by monitoring weather around the world, not just in the United States.
I wouldn't want to come back to work after a weekend of that grey "Stay Tuned" permanently burnt in to the screen of my LCD
Just to alleviate any concerns you may have, an LCD can't burn in like old CRTs. In fact, no standard monitor has been made in over a decade that has the potential for burn in. Screen savers are entertainment value anymore.
I was under the impression that one went to college to attain a liberal education, which is tangentially related to career goals. However, I'll re-affirm the value of internships. I did a couple of internships during college and it set me apart from my peers. However, go to college to become an educated person foremost.
I'm glad to see that someone is mentioning the social aspect of the whole decision. There are three main things you take away from college:
1) A liberal education (which means you appreciate nuance and complexity in decision making, versus whim or emotion) 2) A degree 3) A community
(the remainder is directed more at the originator of the question)
The first two are nearly identical wherever you go, but the latter is unique to every college. The good friends you make in college are likely to be the ones that last for a lifetime. These are people who can be a part of your social network for a long time. I don't want to be preachy or sound like an elitist, but one of the advantages of the top-tier schools are the people whom you meet. There is a lot of good leverage there.
That said, it is hard to be a part of community mid-stream. Unless you need the high-calibre degree for graduate school, I would stay put and foster your network of friends at the present university.
Not to pick on the reviewer or anything, but was anyone else beginning to hear the voice of Comic Book Guy (simpson's reference) in your head about mid-way? It actually got better at that point for me.;)
Just to share a story from the other side, I've hired several people at a University. It is a great place to work, but the hiring process can take about 8 weeks under the best circumstances. I've offered contract work to a shoe-in hire as a way of solving the needs of both sides.
I know it is fashionable to portray the employer as a greedy jerk who wants to yank around the employee, but sometimes a contract-to-hire offer is made in good faith.
The point you raise is precisely what I meant by the phrase, "provided that it doesn't take exorbitant effort to do so." I probably should have said "resources" rather than "effort" to make clear that it is an economic trade off.
I disagree. There is a strong business case for even supporting as little as 2% of another browser market share, provided that it doesn't take exorbitant effort to do so. Look at this way: If I were running a store front and 10% of the people who walked past couldn't open my door because the door knob was proprietary, (yeah, bad analogy, but play along with me) I would be a fool to not look for ways to make my business accessible to the 10%.
Many businesses fight tooth and nail to increase market share even fractions of a percent. I have a feeling that any manager who heard that he was excluding or discouraging 10% of his potential customers would allocate resources for web developers to do the right thing.
I agree about opening the source, but for entirely different reasons. It would be an ideal teaching aid in a real time CS course or for enthusiasts. Although it might be possible to contribute bug fixes, I wouldn't count on it. From what I've read and seen concerning the open source projects, they tend to gather contributors for features much more readily than for bug fixes, especially the variety that are very hard to reproduce or require formal proof along with the fix.
I'll just echo this sentiment. In general I think the east coast is picking up nicely. A couple of months ago I heard a phrase from a recruiter that I hadn't heard for three years: relocation package. Nevermind that I didn't want to move to Ohio.
That is part of the problem. Take Jpeg files for example. They have exif headers that capture all manner of metadata, but some image manipulation programs strip, munge or out right wipe the metadata. You may never know it happened. To the naked eye, you just augmented the image slightly or re-saved it in a new whiz-bang format.
It isn't insurmountable, but it is really easy to lose stuff without noticing anything happening. I did some work at the Library of Congress on metadata capture for image files and we were amazed at how hard it was to keep this stuff in order. Our purpose was directed at archival, which is admittedly more stringent than what the general populace seeks, but some of these issues apply. I think people within 10 years may wax nostalgic about how much easier it was to manage an analog photo. While you can just toss it into a drawer, a digital photo requires more baby sitting to maintain it.
Space isn't the problem. This is like saying that archiving analog photos is easy as long as you have a bigger closet. In truth, you need to first attach useful metadata (will your great grand children know who the people are in the photo, or when and where it was taken?) and to migrate the metadata. If space were the only problem, there would be no problem.
These are entirely two different issues. Leave the hard drive in a safe, dry place for 30 years and only the most diligent researcher will be able to uncover deleted files. A key aspect of file retrieval is knowing what to expect.
While this is true in principle, when taking a longer range view it doesn't hold up. We take for granted what is meant by "content" and the lines between data and metadata become fuzzy. I've opened up an old word processing document in a plain text editor to glean as much textual content as I can find, but been at a loss to recover the formatting.
As trivial as the formatting may seem, compare the look and feel of a 19th century document to a modern one. A strong ethos and aesthetic permeates the formatting choices in a document. Archivists know how to preserve a physical object, but digital sources are tightly coupled to their display mechanism. While you can make a perfect bit for bit copy with no loss, the display medium has a limited shelf life. Emulators only prolong the inevitable -- an orphaned file with interface.
I'm reminded of a situation with a laser disc created in the 70s and sent along on one of the voyager space craft. The text included the text from a book that is nearly a thousand years old. Last year they had to resurrect a PDP-based machine in a museum to read the disc and migrate it to some other format. If they keep doing this every 25 years, what will the data look like? Imagine non-binary computational devices and non-ascii character representations of text or non-gif images. Since they still have the physical book they may fair alright, but left to its own, there are lots of ways that digital data migration can and will fail.
While I respect your experience, having working in the industry, don't expect people like Avi Rubin to be satisfied because the situation is complex and you (meaning your company) have a handle on it. Rubin identified some real security issues related to the system. To be blunt, what is going to be done about it?
Many of us will feel more comfortable about electronic voting when there is a litany of respected PHds and security experts who express comfort. It is incorrigible that the machines are used in production before such assurance has been achieved.
What you cite isn't technically an exit poll, as it was done before the polls opened. However, for the benefit of everyone who will encounter leaked exit polls today, please read the following:
The source is well-informed and brings up many good points to consider. Take any exit poll with a grain of salt and be patient for the official tally. You can burn a lot of energy reading the tea leaves.
In my smart ass days of youth, as I was interning at a fortune 500 company, I had a discussion with the CIO about deploying Linux and Mac workstations to diversify the computing landscape. My reasons dealt with security (non-homogonized computing environment) and some benefits from more diverse exposure to systems.
He gave me the "who can I blame" response. I asked him point blank, "when is the last time you sued Microsoft?"
I may be a little paranoid (heck, I actually am) but I've long suspected the IE support for loose HTML was a strategic decision. Go back to the days when Netscape would render a page with a unclosed table tag as blank. IE rendered the page, and I often encountered sites that didn't work on Netscape.
It could be a coincidence, but the loose HTML support of IE led to a situation where some webmasters conclude that Netscape had poor HTML support. You can argue about standards all day long, but if one browser renders and another crashes or comes up blank there isn't much of a contest.
The chaff is always more plentiful than the wheat, but there are some things that people can do when selecting a realtor. Namely, ask the person about his own home and what properties he owns. You would be surprised how many realtors don't even own property or have the initiative to invest in real estate. While it may be possible to not own land and be a good advisor, I give it slim odds.
I also like to quiz a realtor, in a conversational way, about what he thinks makes a good rental unit. I ask about typical rents in the area, appreciation, etc. Because my investing strategy is a "buy and hold" versus "fix up" or "buy and flip", I ask probing questions to determine if the realtor understands the distinction.
When I get a good vibe from a realtor, I tell them what I watch for and welcome them to call me if they see something I might like. I don't buy often, but I try to get other people doing some of my legwork.
Your example is only tangentially relevant, because the parent poster said that he purchased some rental property. He didn't become a realtor, which as you point out, isn't a technically significant role to play in this world. They basically broker a deal, but as a fellow real estate investor, I'll point out that a savvy realtor is a good partner.
They are basically a joke everywhere I've seen. Sorry if this upsets anyone who graduated from one, but they work best when an aspiring student transfers out during their Sophomore year to a traditional 4 year college. The second best thing you get from college (the first being the education) are the networks you form with other would-be professionals. The community colleges are full of people who occupy the lower strata of the professional ranks and are not good leverage in the post college years.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the same when I read this. I've met the people at NITLE who are developing an implementation of LSI. It is impressive and they have a download of their software available via CVS. For persons interested in this area of research it is worth the while to look at what NITLE is doing.
It all depends on the nature of your research. I work in the field of Humanities Computing. While I represent the CS wing (as opposed to the Humanities), examples abound where the formatting and visual properties of a literary object are essential for research. Separation of content and presentation is a misnomer for the people I work with.
That said, I think any digitization that makes the materials available is a good thing, but it may not serve the research needs for everyone.
Another one that is rampant at my company is top-posting. Everyone insists on quoting a message in a reply and proceeding to post their comments at the top. When I try to lead by example and properly bottom-post, people complain my emails are not clear. Argh.
I used to fight this issue, but I confess that I've joined the dark side. Many email clients discourage it or make it unnecessarily difficult. I'm not 100% certain, but I think the style emerged from Usenet etiquette, where context is important if everyone doesn't have a threaded newsreader. While I'm grounded in this tradition, others don't get it.
I email with my geek and old-timer friends in threaded mode and top-post at my workplace.
I don't think traffic calming and efficiency are at odds. There are scenarios, such as intersections near Universities and public buildings, where it is desirable to discourage fast driving.
I lived in Washington DC for several years. The traffic is notoriously bad. I avoided much of it by commuting on bicycle, however they made every attempt to streamline it. Not for one moment do I believe they were intentionally adding to the gridlock. It is one issue that is guaranteed to mobilize the electorate, so I doubt the conspiracy theory that traffic is intentionally slow to drive commuters onto public transit. If the current delays won't do it, what makes anyone think more delay will work?
I had a friend who worked with the National Weather Service at the Department of Agriculture. You might find his explanation of this service interesting. He was often called upon to verify or negate rumors about blizzards or various weather calamities that may have been perpetuated by rivals. In effect, a banana exporter may find it profitable if people think the supply is in danger from foul weather. His group made sure that US importers didn't pay any fraudulent premiums by monitoring weather around the world, not just in the United States.
I wouldn't want to come back to work after a weekend of that grey "Stay Tuned" permanently burnt in to the screen of my LCD
Just to alleviate any concerns you may have, an LCD can't burn in like old CRTs. In fact, no standard monitor has been made in over a decade that has the potential for burn in. Screen savers are entertainment value anymore.
I was under the impression that one went to college to attain a liberal education, which is tangentially related to career goals. However, I'll re-affirm the value of internships. I did a couple of internships during college and it set me apart from my peers. However, go to college to become an educated person foremost.
I'm glad to see that someone is mentioning the social aspect of the whole decision. There are three main things you take away from college:
1) A liberal education (which means you appreciate nuance and complexity in decision making, versus whim or emotion)
2) A degree
3) A community
(the remainder is directed more at the originator of the question)
The first two are nearly identical wherever you go, but the latter is unique to every college. The good friends you make in college are likely to be the ones that last for a lifetime. These are people who can be a part of your social network for a long time. I don't want to be preachy or sound like an elitist, but one of the advantages of the top-tier schools are the people whom you meet. There is a lot of good leverage there.
That said, it is hard to be a part of community mid-stream. Unless you need the high-calibre degree for graduate school, I would stay put and foster your network of friends at the present university.
Not to pick on the reviewer or anything, but was anyone else beginning to hear the voice of Comic Book Guy (simpson's reference) in your head about mid-way? It actually got better at that point for me. ;)
Just to share a story from the other side, I've hired several people at a University. It is a great place to work, but the hiring process can take about 8 weeks under the best circumstances. I've offered contract work to a shoe-in hire as a way of solving the needs of both sides.
I know it is fashionable to portray the employer as a greedy jerk who wants to yank around the employee, but sometimes a contract-to-hire offer is made in good faith.
The point you raise is precisely what I meant by the phrase, "provided that it doesn't take exorbitant effort to do so." I probably should have said "resources" rather than "effort" to make clear that it is an economic trade off.
I disagree. There is a strong business case for even supporting as little as 2% of another browser market share, provided that it doesn't take exorbitant effort to do so. Look at this way: If I were running a store front and 10% of the people who walked past couldn't open my door because the door knob was proprietary, (yeah, bad analogy, but play along with me) I would be a fool to not look for ways to make my business accessible to the 10%.
Many businesses fight tooth and nail to increase market share even fractions of a percent. I have a feeling that any manager who heard that he was excluding or discouraging 10% of his potential customers would allocate resources for web developers to do the right thing.
I agree about opening the source, but for entirely different reasons. It would be an ideal teaching aid in a real time CS course or for enthusiasts. Although it might be possible to contribute bug fixes, I wouldn't count on it. From what I've read and seen concerning the open source projects, they tend to gather contributors for features much more readily than for bug fixes, especially the variety that are very hard to reproduce or require formal proof along with the fix.
I'll just echo this sentiment. In general I think the east coast is picking up nicely. A couple of months ago I heard a phrase from a recruiter that I hadn't heard for three years: relocation package. Nevermind that I didn't want to move to Ohio.
That is part of the problem. Take Jpeg files for example. They have exif headers that capture all manner of metadata, but some image manipulation programs strip, munge or out right wipe the metadata. You may never know it happened. To the naked eye, you just augmented the image slightly or re-saved it in a new whiz-bang format.
It isn't insurmountable, but it is really easy to lose stuff without noticing anything happening. I did some work at the Library of Congress on metadata capture for image files and we were amazed at how hard it was to keep this stuff in order. Our purpose was directed at archival, which is admittedly more stringent than what the general populace seeks, but some of these issues apply. I think people within 10 years may wax nostalgic about how much easier it was to manage an analog photo. While you can just toss it into a drawer, a digital photo requires more baby sitting to maintain it.
Space isn't the problem. This is like saying that archiving analog photos is easy as long as you have a bigger closet. In truth, you need to first attach useful metadata (will your great grand children know who the people are in the photo, or when and where it was taken?) and to migrate the metadata. If space were the only problem, there would be no problem.
These are entirely two different issues. Leave the hard drive in a safe, dry place for 30 years and only the most diligent researcher will be able to uncover deleted files. A key aspect of file retrieval is knowing what to expect.
While this is true in principle, when taking a longer range view it doesn't hold up. We take for granted what is meant by "content" and the lines between data and metadata become fuzzy. I've opened up an old word processing document in a plain text editor to glean as much textual content as I can find, but been at a loss to recover the formatting.
As trivial as the formatting may seem, compare the look and feel of a 19th century document to a modern one. A strong ethos and aesthetic permeates the formatting choices in a document. Archivists know how to preserve a physical object, but digital sources are tightly coupled to their display mechanism. While you can make a perfect bit for bit copy with no loss, the display medium has a limited shelf life. Emulators only prolong the inevitable -- an orphaned file with interface.
I'm reminded of a situation with a laser disc created in the 70s and sent along on one of the voyager space craft. The text included the text from a book that is nearly a thousand years old. Last year they had to resurrect a PDP-based machine in a museum to read the disc and migrate it to some other format. If they keep doing this every 25 years, what will the data look like? Imagine non-binary computational devices and non-ascii character representations of text or non-gif images. Since they still have the physical book they may fair alright, but left to its own, there are lots of ways that digital data migration can and will fail.
While I respect your experience, having working in the industry, don't expect people like Avi Rubin to be satisfied because the situation is complex and you (meaning your company) have a handle on it. Rubin identified some real security issues related to the system. To be blunt, what is going to be done about it?
Many of us will feel more comfortable about electronic voting when there is a litany of respected PHds and security experts who express comfort. It is incorrigible that the machines are used in production before such assurance has been achieved.
What you cite isn't technically an exit poll, as it was done before the polls opened. However, for the benefit of everyone who will encounter leaked exit polls today, please read the following:
p olls_what.html
http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/11/exit_
The source is well-informed and brings up many good points to consider. Take any exit poll with a grain of salt and be patient for the official tally. You can burn a lot of energy reading the tea leaves.
In my smart ass days of youth, as I was interning at a fortune 500 company, I had a discussion with the CIO about deploying Linux and Mac workstations to diversify the computing landscape. My reasons dealt with security (non-homogonized computing environment) and some benefits from more diverse exposure to systems.
He gave me the "who can I blame" response. I asked him point blank, "when is the last time you sued Microsoft?"
I may be a little paranoid (heck, I actually am) but I've long suspected the IE support for loose HTML was a strategic decision. Go back to the days when Netscape would render a page with a unclosed table tag as blank. IE rendered the page, and I often encountered sites that didn't work on Netscape.
It could be a coincidence, but the loose HTML support of IE led to a situation where some webmasters conclude that Netscape had poor HTML support. You can argue about standards all day long, but if one browser renders and another crashes or comes up blank there isn't much of a contest.
The chaff is always more plentiful than the wheat, but there are some things that people can do when selecting a realtor. Namely, ask the person about his own home and what properties he owns. You would be surprised how many realtors don't even own property or have the initiative to invest in real estate. While it may be possible to not own land and be a good advisor, I give it slim odds.
I also like to quiz a realtor, in a conversational way, about what he thinks makes a good rental unit. I ask about typical rents in the area, appreciation, etc. Because my investing strategy is a "buy and hold" versus "fix up" or "buy and flip", I ask probing questions to determine if the realtor understands the distinction.
When I get a good vibe from a realtor, I tell them what I watch for and welcome them to call me if they see something I might like. I don't buy often, but I try to get other people doing some of my legwork.
Your example is only tangentially relevant, because the parent poster said that he purchased some rental property. He didn't become a realtor, which as you point out, isn't a technically significant role to play in this world. They basically broker a deal, but as a fellow real estate investor, I'll point out that a savvy realtor is a good partner.
They are basically a joke everywhere I've seen. Sorry if this upsets anyone who graduated from one, but they work best when an aspiring student transfers out during their Sophomore year to a traditional 4 year college. The second best thing you get from college (the first being the education) are the networks you form with other would-be professionals. The community colleges are full of people who occupy the lower strata of the professional ranks and are not good leverage in the post college years.